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een placed on security measures (moats, police,
separation of fans…) and first aid (doctors, surgery,
helicopters…). At the same time the spectator’s
autonomy has been reduced to a minimum in order
to hinder his natural “fury”.’
We have to understand Valcárcel Medina’s proposal
as part of a process of identification of his artistic
ideas with those of the city. The selection of images
for his State of Siege, from 1994, made by José Díaz
Cuyás may serve that purpose: ‘The art public is the
citizen, in the noblest sense; in other words, he who is
in the city. / It is a different thing to leave the city to
enter the place of art although, of course, that place
is in the city. / It is that leaving the city so as not, in
fact, to leave it shows the nonsense of urban, urbanised
art and, by similarity, art as an element of urbanity.
/ I feel an imperious need to establish a link between
the public and the space occupied by them, their
space, which thus becomes public space. / The
urbanisation we are undergoing is, however, the farthest
thing from a city... / And as art is urban ground, we
– urbanised without an urbs – become that nonsense
I was talking about / We show at every step that we
are uprooted from reality. But not uprooted in a literary
aspect, but in a real one. We are really uprooted
because, precisely, we are uprooted from reality.
/ If I leave for the city from my place of rootlessness,
it is not that I am doing the opposite of what I have
said: (leaving the city to enter the place of art),
no; it is that, if I want to enter, I need not (or I do not
have to) leave, because all is and is found in the
city.’ Understanding his work as the construct of a
vast city, we would assign to Premature Architecture
the space and place where the symbolic triggers the
endless struggle of agonistic games, the unstoppable
speed of aggressive competition, the construction
of capitalism on the basis of the competitiveness of
the social group. But in Valcarcél Medina the expression
of that struggle between uneven forces, the exhibition of
that field of tensions is simply shown. To liken
monumental statuary and football competition in a
single paradigm could not be more obvious to the
eyes of the sociologist or the cultural anthropologist.
And so it is important to learn Valcárcel Medina’s
tool, which we are going to make our own. The point
is to add his paradigm to our story to try to understand
how agonistic games – sports, competitions, role-plays,
etc. – embody the social body in their symbolic
deployment, construct the forms and life of the city,
weave the relations of the community marking the
economic, political and social character that constitutes
them. It is not that they have to choose, like a modern
Don Juan, between being a statue or being a sportsman,
between being a football player or being a monument.
As José Díaz Cuyás points out: ‘His Premature
Architectures are a paradigmatic example. In them
two contradictory systems – two reasons – which the
city keeps active and in a permanent battle confront
one another, that of the common utilitarian logic of
the building and that of the private and privative
logic of the public construction. Nothing more opposed
to utopianism, to the imagined desired, than those
architectures linked to what their author defines as an
art of the obvious, in other words, that art that would
consist of showing what is evident, not what one brings
with one, but what is there before everyone’s eyes.’
Let us replace Cachuca and Castorín, the militiamen
punished for playing football with the head of St Antony,
with the figures of Christopher Lasch and Rafael
Sánchez Ferlosio and let us put them on the playing
field. We will concentrate on a single play, the one
that deals with the agonistic quality of the game and
its importance in the modes and forms that make a
community. No-one denies those ties, though their
quality is gauged in a different way. Ferlosio’s attacking
play comes from one of the essays in El alma y la
vergüenza, entitled El deporte y el estado. Lasch’s
sudden counterattack is in his essay La cultura del
narcisismo, to be exact El ocio como escape, the
last chapter of the part entitled La degradación del
deporte. I should say that the plays are presented with
some modifications, but basically they respect the
game plan of both trainers. The most artificial part of
it, the theatrical nexus that unifies the two texts, is no
dramatisation but a reflection of the two authors’ taste
for shouting when it comes to discussing sport.
‘But the fact that agonistic sport, in the repetitive
and unlimited succession of its own internal vicissitudes
(like, for example, the results of the matches or the
breaking of some speed or idiocy record by thousandths
of a second), cannot be considered of public interest
in no way means that the invasive and crushing
existence of sport as a social phenomenon is not,
especially the unprecedented atrophy attained by
football, with its alarming power as a one-track-minded
obsession-inducing dementer of the masses and,
moreover, protected and promoted under the concept
of state interest. You cannot imagine how even my
friends reacted when once I happened to say – though
concealing the unilateral nature of the statement behind
the warning “to put it in the elementary, expeditious
jargon of the students of ’68” – that mass agonistic
sport is intrinsically fascist! It is true that, dispensing
with Greco-Roman antiquity, the agonistic passion had
its games peculiar to each nation in the modern era,
but it was only after the internationalisation launched
by the restoration of the Olympic Games when the
states began to take an interest in their champions.
Nevertheless, after the experience of fascist Italy
and Nazi Germany, which discovered and exploited
agonistic sport as a formidable educational instrument
for the most fervid corralling of the masses in
ultranationalist hubris, it is strange that democratic
states have not looked with fresh suspicion and
reconsidered with greater circumspection the very
origin of agonistic sport, but have given themselves
over unreservedly and even enthusiastically to its cult
and dedication. To some extent, it may be simply put
down to the fact that a state, however democratic it
may be, does not lose the servitude of prestige, and
once victory at sport has been set among the “obligatory
prestiges”, no state can afford to renounce it, and all
the less if, as in the Cold War, it was “scoring a goal”
for democracy against totalitarianism. However, I believe
that there is another deeper, more important reason
for states to foster the cult and cultivation of mass
agonistic sport: its instructive value for moral education
and for the demands for social adaptation best suited
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